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Balto-the-Wolf-Dog

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  • About me
    Aerospace Engineer
  • Location
    Alaska
  • Interests
    Flying
    An artist with dangerous engineering tendancies

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  1. Hey, guys, After a long period of silence on my part, LinuxGuruGamer has done me the tremendous favor of taking over the maintenance of this project. As the last poster stated, LinuxGuruGamer's adoption thread can be found here I'll probably see you guys around one day or another, and almost certainly in KSP2, but for now, direct all comments and inquiries to his new thread. I'm requesting this one be locked to prevent confusion. Cheers, Balto
  2. Hey, guys, After a long period of silence on my part, LinuxGuruGamer has done me the tremendous favor of taking over the maintenance of this project. As the last poster stated, LinuxGuruGamer's adoption thread can be found here I'll probably see you guys around one day or another, and almost certainly in KSP2, but for now, direct all comments and inquiries to his new thread. I'm requesting this one be locked to prevent confusion. Cheers, Balto
  3. Thanks a ton, both to you guys for picking it up and to whomever is still interested after my years of absenteeism. I've felt bad for not getting back to this for a long time. Unfortunately I don't have a terrific excuse; I've just been embroiled in a lot of other projects and haven't been able to summon the interest. It makes me very happy to see this ongoing, and who knows; maybe I'll contribute a cockpit here and there. For now I've got writing to do and software to develop. Cheers. Have an updated Prakasa logo that never got implemented. Use at your discretion.
  4. Should. Prakasa has no technical dependency in and of itself outside the use of (what was once) RPM, which I think someone is still maintaining. Since KSP has finally stopped updating I think I might actually, after all these years, do a final master of it with the new stuff that never got released back in 2019/2020, but I can't promise anything. Unfortunately I can't really remaster the old stuff to get away from RPM either way. This is now a very old project (several computers old), and most of my original source files are gone or associated with licenses I no longer maintain. If anyone wants the unenviable task of "adopting" this project and seeing if you can squeeze a better remaster out of it, by all means contact me. I'll supply you with every last scrap of source I can dig up.
  5. Hello Balto, I absolutely love your Prakasa Aeroworks mod. Truly a masterpiece. I have had to go up to KSP 1.9.1 and my collection of mods is lacking a lot due to Prakasa's  1.3.1 limitation. Is there anyway you can either recompile for 1.9.1 or maybe just allow me to do it as a training tool for future modding?

    1. Balto-the-Wolf-Dog

      Balto-the-Wolf-Dog

      I haven't been following KSP versions for awhile. What happened between 1.3.1 and 1.9.1 that's killing compatibility? Just the RPM dependency? The issue with that is Prakasa is now a fairly old project, and one I started when I had no idea what I was doing from a technical or a practical perspective. A lot of my old source files are long gone, which makes replacing instruments basically impossible on anything from that era. I would still like to revive the project though, and am more inclined to do so now since the KSP 2 delays. I recently jumped ship to blender though, so it would be good practice. I can't promise anything though.

    2. TemporalFeast

      TemporalFeast

      I'll have to check that out and get back to ya.

  6. Update: Panel spec map fixed to be more consistent (and not blow out reflections on the text inlayed in the panels, as only the wood inlay was supposed to be chromed). Learning to get substance painter spec exports to play nice with KSP shaders has been an adventure, but with a lot of experimentation I was able to hack them mostly into working today. The process still involves photoshop trial-and-error postprocessing though, so if anyone knows better export settings, please tell me. Also, the Asima successor from earlier in the thread has made it in game: Since I'm also restoring Asima, Vahak will essentially be her upmarket sister.
  7. Panel update. Had to shift to glass for part compatibility, but it works.
  8. Good news! Today I bring not only WIP images, but actual in-engine WIP images. I've finally gotten around to setting unity back up and remembering how to prep models for export. Karaneva, Prakasa's first 1.875 pod. Props aren't cooperating just yet because I haven't quite worked out how to use MAS. Karaneva aside, Asima's spiritual successor (a few posts above) is already textured inside and out, and I've heavily rebuilt Asima herself to bring her more in line with modern standards. It certainly feels good to be writing .mu's again; it's been a hot minute.
  9. I won't panic too much about it, then. For now, everything going forward will be using the new one. I've found myself in need of a 1.875 airplane cockpit because frankly it's the first reasonable fuselage size we've had, so that's the next project
  10. A few announcements: Due to the horrifically bad habits I was in when I started developing this mod (and because I lost some of the old source files) I intend to split Prakasa into a current and legacy part download, with the Jalakag as the cutoff point. A few legacy pods will be updated into relative currency (probably Asima, Dhyana, and Naga) and added to the main file. Others will not generally be supported going forward. Given that they're parts, however, they should work fine regardless of version. If anyone would like to mess with any of the legacy parts themselves, I'm more than happy to provide whatever source files I can dig up. RPM discontinuation overhaul: When I ran away making 9001 cockpits I wasn't counting on RPM being discontinued. Bringing the mod up to date now requires every single IVA panel (or full IVA depending on the presence of source files) to be completely rebuilt. As big as Prakasa is, that makes for a very long and arduous process. I intend to perform it on all non-legacy pods, but won't promise it on the legacies. I'm not sure how involved it will ultimately be, but given parttools has updated several times since a few of these parts and most of their unity projects are lost to history, I suspect I'll have to completely re-compile most everything being brought up to date both interior and exterior Again, if anyone would like to build IVAs for either supported or legacy cockpits, I would gladly provide source files / generally be much obliged. I may split the supported parts into separately packaged individual downloads so people who don't want every part aren't burdened with Prakasa's irresponsible size. Engines and utilities will be kept together, but cockpits will be separate from that package and from each other. I'm not married to this idea. Let me know if you'd rather I keep everything together. Obsolete components I don't consider Prakasa's fuel tanks to be necessary any longer since the stock parts were overhauled, with the notable exception of xenon-bearing varieties. As such I don't plan to support them. Paint Access to substance painter has proven both incredibly useful and dangerously addictive. Supported parts will probably be repainted and may gain livery swap support. I have yet to come up with substance painter smart materials that are as stockalike as I'd prefer. If anyone has any they don't mind sharing, I'd really appreciate them. Thanks guys.
  11. I've been doing some testing on this subject with small helicopters. The bizarre thing is the rotors appear to behave like swashplate rotors on the roll axis, and I've consistently been able to make helicopters that control smoothly on the roll axis without the use of reaction wheels. Following the rotor blades through slow rotations while giving them control inputs confirms that roll inputs work as they should in a swashplate helicopter. Pitch does not, however. Unfortunately I think the correct behavior of roll may just be an odd side effect of the way KSP assigns angles to control inputs normally. That's unfortunate given how promising it is.
  12. Given I haven't seen an operable one yet, I thought it might be worth a thread to share ideas and progress in developing a working ornithopter. I'm about three hours in myself, and so far my main prototype has managed about 11.5 m/s before the batteries die. It doesn't seem to be very short of rotation speed at that point, but isn't quite capable of it. Some of my more adventurous designs have pushed 14 m/s, but weren't very stable (and were hideous). All so far have taken a relatively long period of time to accelerate. My current configuration features dragonfly-style single-joint wings with opposing strokes. The strokes themselves are biased toward the upstroke: the angle of incidence rotates more steeply up on the upstroke than it does down on the downstroke, and the bulk of the dihedral range occurs above the neutral position for gear clearance reasons (60 degrees above 90, ten degrees below 90). Balanced strokes would probably be more effective, but haven't tested that yet. Wing area seems to relate fairly directly to acceleration (assuming the stroke remains the same), but the 14 m/s cap I've been seeing seems to result primarily from the stroke topping out and not beating fast enough for its net thrust to overcome drag. Basically a prop-pitch issue, but for ornithopters. The most effective workaround I've found so far is to offset the wings away from the fuselage so they're forced to travel a greater distance over the course of the stroke, but so far it hasn't been enough to fly, and it has a habit of baiting the kraken. Increasing the range of the wing incidence curve would probably help too, but I haven't found a good way to do so without outstripping the movement speed limits. I'd wager by now somebody has a much better design than this one, but I thought I'd put it out there
  13. Hello again for the first time in a long time. I know I said I'd un-dead myself four months ago, but better late than never. Finals are (mostly) over, and the bug finally bit today. On a related note, I've been learning substance painter for work, and in the process discovered that I actually really enjoy working with it. Texture work was formerly my least favorite part of the process, so it's a very welcome change, especially given how much better a job I can do with it. The Asima pod has always been a favorite of mine and is one of the very few SketchUp-Era pods I actually still use in my own builds, so this spiritual successor will be the first part in Prakasa to be textured in Substance.
  14. That's really cool to hear, particularly given the pretty-shoddy-in-retrospect craftsmanship on everything before Jalakag or so, when I hadn't quite figured topology out. I'd like to say I'm going to rebuild all the old stuff from the ground up, but so far attempts to that end have resulted more in spiritual successors than in faithful overhauls (hence the last 2.5 pod not being a real Kalpana replacement), so for now I'm just going to forge ahead. Any particular profile/style requests? It might be a little while given I have to rebuild my unity environment from scratch, but I'm pretty sure I mostly remember how to do it.
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